


In A Little Room

by highfantastical



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Angst, Asylum Fic, Chicken Pox, Christmas Story, F/M, Post-Canon, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-22
Updated: 2009-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-05 00:16:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/35637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/highfantastical/pseuds/highfantastical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for Riva in the Yuletide 2007 Challenge.</p><p>Love is not love which alters when it vomiting actor finds: three Christmases for Geoffrey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In A Little Room

_1._

The blackbird wheeled in the autumn winds.  
It was a small part of the pantomime.

Geoffrey gets chicken pox four days after they arrive in Montreal, when the apartment is still full of half-unpacked boxes of books and Ellen's kimonos are flung over the backs of chairs. It takes an hour just to find the thermometer; snow whirls against the windows until it seems that they might break.

Geoffrey considers the likelihood of Ellen realising if it turns into shingles, and resigns himself to shuffling off this mortal coil a little earlier than planned. He feels surprisingly sanguine about the inevitable reunion with Oliver, because at least if he dies the itching will stop. But Anna flies back from Bolivia one icy December morning, tanned and smiling more than she used to: she is, as in times gone by, his saviour.

Ellen is free to go out in the mornings and bring back oranges and white grapes, lavender honey and sachertorte, while Anna takes on more onerous tasks, such as persuading-Geoffrey-into-a-cooling-bath, dabbing-Geoffrey-with-calamine-lotion, and, a challenge even for her, distracting-Geoffrey-from-scratching.

When his temperature goes down, Geoffrey spends a lot of time thinking about _The Merchant of Venice_. The play's appeal lies largely in the fact that it was never done at New Burbage during his tenure there, but one evening Lewis Sawicki calls and -- after a good twenty minutes of theatrical gossip -- hints at an eagerness to do Shylock and, more importantly, a willingness to do so _sans argent_. This is a big offer: Sawicki's done ten years at the RSC and a phenomenal Coriolanus; he's only back in Canada for some wound-licking after a shitty divorce. Arguably, though, he owes his success to a twenty-year-old Geoffrey Tennant: Lewis had been in grad school -- fellowships rolling in and two articles in print before his dissertation was even finished -- _until_ he played Mercutio to Geoffrey's first Romeo and decided to get into theatre for good. (Geoffrey had never quite succeeded in recovering the esteem of the philosophy department.)

Geoffrey builds a set model and tries not to drip his calamine lotion on it when Anna's been a little too liberal. While he is dabbing glue onto balsa wood, Ellen ransacks Ogilvy's for tinsel and baubles and an angel for the top of the tree. Geoffrey's scabs begin to fade.

***

_2._

For days I felt like an inhabitant  
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy  
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,  
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

[Geoffrey lies still, as still as he can, and he breathes slowly as though it is a great challenge and he has taken up arms against the idea of stopping. His memories are clear, like his understanding of Hamlet, like snow that hangs in the air before falling.]

"Darling, you look awful," Oliver says, buttoning Geoffrey's coat for him with fluttering and reluctant hands: the risk of personal contact was clearly outweighed by the direr possibility of Geoffrey being sick again, possibly this time on his new damask sofa. "Still, it should give Ellen a chance to indulge -- nay, _develop_ \-- some womanly instincts".

Geoffrey begins to explain that Ellen is entirely perfect in every possible way but that he is very well aware that relying on her for compassionate nursing would invite a painful and untimely death. Unfortunately, the unimpeachably clear sentences which present themselves to his brain are somehow transformed on their way to his mouth into "_You_ could look after me, Oliver".

Oliver has hustled him into the cab before he can deliver his parting shot -- "it was _your_ eggnog!" -- and he thinks, dimly, that love is not love which alters when it vomiting actor finds.

[Geoffrey tries to keep his eyes open all the time because when he is asleep he is always in Denmark. Sometimes he has to strain them open, when his hands aren't free, and now at the very edge of his vision there is a glittering blueness, so bright it can hardly be real. He turns his head as far as he can, and sees two orderlies through the perspex window, their arms full of tinsel. So it must be December.]

Ellen runs in two hours late, the party already well under way and Oliver several sheets to the wind. Her long hair is loose and flying around her like a blanket of flame, and Geoffrey, all at once, can hardly breathe at all. Her dress is a silver sheath; beneath it, her body seems only a suggestion.

Frank is opening bottles of Bordeaux, and Oliver presses a glass to her lips. "The luscious clusters of the vine, upon _thy_ mouth do crush their wine," he cries, and Geoffrey laughs and tops up his own eggnog because Oliver had made it himself, and he was so pleased that Geoffrey had chosen it.

[December, Geoffrey thinks, coming out of the past with a jolt. When blood is nipt, and ways be foul. And then the laughter is welling up inside him, uncontrollable as blood, the way it always does when he thinks about plays which are, one might say, _not-Danish_. It is too strong for him, he howls and his body arches up off the bed; tears slide sideways into his hair and he wheezes and wishes more than anything to be dead.]

Oliver's talents do not lie in the mixing of dairy-based alcoholic beverages, Geoffrey thinks. He is running with sweat, gripping the toilet bowl with both hands and trying not to be sick again. He can still feel Oliver's arm around his waist; he can still hear the low, insinuating murmur against his ear.

"This year, Geoffrey. You're ready now. Go away and have fun, have Christmas, get drunk and get fucked, get it out of your system. And then -- then we'll work. You won't rest, Geoffrey. No more rest." Geoffrey shivers, suddenly icy instead of hot, his mouth tastes bitter and his eyes are aching.

"One in a million -- maybe fewer than that -- is right for Hamlet. And it's you -- I know that, you know that. But you have to eat and sleep and breathe it. You must live and die with him."

[Out of nowhere there is a sting in his thigh, and he is too tired to keep his eyes open any longer and too calm to scream. They are undoing the restraints and dressing his wrists, and he wishes he still had that dagger, he wishes then that Ellen had come with him, that she were here. They could commit extensive swanicide together, New Burbage's answer to Bonnie and Clyde. I hate to bust the cap on a woman, Geoffrey thinks. He drags open his eyes for a moment, and when he sees the half-darkness of the room he wants to scream, but at the same time he is small and sick and grateful that one of the orderlies from outside -- Otis, on a sudden he remembers the man's name -- is blotting the tears from his temples and pulling the blanket up to cover him.]

***

_3._

The pine-tree sweetens my body  
The white iris beautifies me.

Ellen decides that Geoffrey's first trip out into Montreal should be celebrated fittingly. Barred from the kitchen, he returns, a little anxiously, to the construction of the Belmont set.

It is probably safe to assert that, if Geoffrey Tennant has a favourite among the many sentences which Ellen has spoken in his presence, it is almost certainly not "Geoffrey! I'm cooking bananas flambé." Nor, indeed, is this a top choice of possible famous-last-words. Geoffrey drops his miniature Bassanio and spins round, but it is already too late: Ellen's fire-filled pan melts the angel's tasteful polyester robes, the tinsel frizzles up and -- after a judicious application by Geoffrey of the very powerful fire extinguisher -- few baubles remain intact.

The tree itself, like Ellen's eyebrows, is only mildly singed. Geoffrey's little figures are surprisingly decorative, really. Anna says, "Geoffrey, I think – under the circumstances, I think it would be okay for you to have your present early," and the tree is crowned with a giant stuffed microbe. It is red and blue and cheerful, and Geoffrey says darkly that it bears little resemblance to the chicken pox virus as he knew it.

On Christmas Eve, Geoffrey takes the eggs out of Ellen's hands, leads her from the kitchen and makes mulled wine instead, without any help at all. He pauses at the entrance to the sitting-room, with the jug in his hands: Ellen is telling drunken-Geoffrey stories to Lewis Sawicki, who is older, crosser and more thoughtful than ever before, and will make a brilliant Shylock; Anna is replacing the Duke of Venice, who seems to have fallen off his branch again. Geoffrey distributes the wine, which is not perhaps of the very highest quality, but is at least unlikely to cause food-poisoning. "To Oliver," he says, lifting his glass, "the onlie begetter."

Later he sits on the edge of the bed, and watches Ellen smooth cream into her face. Shylock, he thinks. That reminds me of something, another play--

"Infinite riches in a little room," says Geoffrey. She looks up; she meets his eyes. It's not Shakespeare. But, like everything else, just for a moment, that's okay.

***

_...sit, sit,  
&amp; recover &amp; be whole  
_

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to loneraven for introducing me to giant microbes. This story wouldn't have happened without them.
> 
> Quotations have been borrowed, with all gratitude, from several works in the public domain, and also from poems by Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney and John Berryman.


End file.
